“Ah!  I did not know” (though he did know), Golenishtchev answered carelessly.  “Have you been here long?” he added.

“Four days,” Vronsky answered, once more scrutinizing his friend’s face intently.

“Yes, he’s a decent fellow, and will look at the thing properly,” Vronsky said to himself, catching the significance of Golenishtchev’s face and the change of subject.  “I can introduce him to Anna, he looks at it properly.”

During those three months that Vronsky had spent abroad with Anna, he had always on meeting new people asked himself how the new person would look at his relations with Anna, and for the most part, in men, he had met with the “proper” way of looking at it.  But if he had been asked, and those who looked at it “properly” had been asked, exactly how they did look at it, both he and they would have been greatly puzzled to answer.

In reality, those who in Vronsky’s opinion had the “proper” view had no sort of view at all, but behaved in general as well-bred persons do behave in regard to all the complex and insoluble problems with which life is encompassed on all sides; they behaved with propriety, avoiding allusions and unpleasant questions.  They assumed an air of fully comprehending the import and force of the situation, of accepting and even approving of it, but of considering it superfluous and uncalled for to put all this into words.

Vronsky at once divined that Golenishtchev was of this class, and therefore was doubly pleased to see him.  And in fact, Golenishtchev’s manner to Madame Karenina, when he was taken to call on her, was all that Vronsky could have desired.  Obviously without the slightest effort he steered clear of all subjects which might lead to embarrassment.

He had never met Anna before, and was struck by her beauty, and still more by the frankness with which she accepted her position.  She blushed when Vronsky brought in Golenishtchev, and he was extremely charmed by this childish blush overspreading her candid and handsome face.  But what he liked particularly was the way in which at once, as though on purpose that there might be no misunderstanding with an outsider, she called Vronsky simply Alexey, and said they were moving into a house they had just taken, what was here called a palazzo.  Golenishtchev liked this direct and simple attitude to her own position.  Looking at Anna’s manner of simple-hearted, spirited gaiety, and knowing Alexey Alexandrovitch and Vronsky, Golenishtchev fancied that he understood her perfectly.  He fancied that he understood what she was utterly unable to understand:  how it was that, having made her husband wretched, having abandoned him and her son and lost her good name, she yet felt full of spirits, gaiety, and happiness.

“It’s in the guide-book,” said Golenishtchev, referring to the palazzo Vronsky had taken.  “There’s a first-rate Tintoretto there.  One of his latest period.”